Vaughn T. Combs

Phoenix: SOA based information management services

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has developed a reference set of Information Management (IM) Services that will provide an essential piece of the envisioned final Net-Centric IM solution for the Department of Defense (DoD). These IM Services will provide mission critical functionality to enable seamless interoperability between existing and future DoD systems and services while maintaining a highly available IM capability across the wide spectrum of differing scalability and performance requirements. AFRL designed this set of IM Services for integration with other DoD and commercial SOA environments. The services developed will provide capabilities for information submission, information brokering and discovery, repository, query, type management, dissemination, session management, authorization, service brokering and event notification. In addition, the IM services support common information models that facilitate the management and dissemination of information consistent with client needs and established policy. The services support flexible and extensible definitions of session, service, and channel contexts that enable the application of Quality of Service (QoS) and security policies at many levels within the SOA.

Jini-based publish and subscribe capability

This paper describes a Publish and Subscribe capability developed under the Air Force Research Laboratory s (AFRL) Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) project. The paper will give a brief description of the JBI and it s core service components of publish, subscribe and query. A detailed description fo the Pub/Sub system design and implementation will then be given describing how and where Java, Jini, and XML technologies were used to describe information objects, match subscribers to appropriate dissemination nodes, and disseminate information objects to subscribing clients. Fianlly we describe a number of applications that are currently using the Pub/Sub capability.

A dynamic and policy-controlled approach to federating information systems

Timely access to relevant data and information is critical to successful mission execution in network centric warfare. Often, the data required to support a mission is not always resident within a single system, but is distributed among multiple systems that must be dynamically interconnected to support the data and information needs. While proprietary and stove-piped information systems have slowly given way to standardized information management architectures (such as the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) architecture developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory), each independent organization and/or mission is normally associated with a separate instance of a managed information space that operates in an independent manner. This is necessary given the different stakeholders and administrative domains responsible for the information. However, the demands for coordination and cooperation require interoperability and information exchange between these independently operating information spaces. This paper describes a federated approach to interconnecting multiple information spaces to enable data interchange. We propose a set of interfaces to facilitate dynamic, runtime discovery and federation of information spaces. We also integrate with the KAoS policy and domain services framework to realize policy-based control over the federation and exchange of information. Our approach allows clients to transparently perform publish, subscribe, and query operations across all the federated information spaces. We have integrated with three existing JBI implementations – Apollo from the Air Force Research Laboratory, Mercury from General Dynamics and AIMS from Northrop Grumman. Most recently, we have integrated with Phoenix, a fully SoA (Service-oriented Architecture) based approach to information management.

Improving timeliness and reliability of data delivery in tactical wireless environments with Mockets communications library

Network centric warfare relies on the timely and reliable delivery of data to disparate cooperating nodes in tactical networking environments. Given the limited bandwidth available and the unreliability of network links, data often accumulates in application and/or network queues, resulting in increased latency in the delivery of the data. The Mockets communications library addresses this problem via dynamic message replacement. The message replacement functionality of Mockets allows the system to drop all but the most recent message within a specific message flow by removing older, outdated messages from the queues. This paper describes and evaluates, in the context of the U.S. Air Forces Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) system, the timeliness of end-to-end delivery of data using the Mockets library. In addition to dynamic message replacement, other capabilities in the Mockets library include options for reliable vs. unreliable and sequenced vs. unsequenced delivery of data, detailed statistics and feedback regarding the connection, and assignment and dynamic adjustment of priorities of messages. This paper provides a qualitative analysis of these different capabilities and their suitability to address the transport requirements in JBI. It also provides a quantitative comparison of Mockets with SCTP and SCPS-TP, which are similar technologies with existing available candidate implementations. Our results show that the Mockets library with the message replacement significantly outperforms these other transport protocols.

Extending Net-Centricity to Coalition Operations

To bring the advantages of network-centric warfare to coalition warfighting, we must significantly improve our ability to quickly share critical information while still satisfying security requirements. Here, the authors explore a services-based approach to such information management.